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hazelnot :yell:

@ghost_bird yeah but they're telling me that somehow the decompression on the CPU would be faster than reading the uncompressed file and that goes against everything I know on the topic and sounds so wrong to me that it's genuinely making me uncomfortable

@hazelnot @ghost_bird when I was in my first job (15 years ago), we learned some rough approximations for performance. I've forgotten the exact numbers, but they weren't the point

CPU caches, RAM, disk and network are orders of magnitude apart from each other.

@meena @ghost_bird I'm not sure what you mean by that, sorry 😅

@hazelnot @ghost_bird It all depends on where the bottleneck is. If you're reading from disk as fast as you can, but have spare CPU capacity, then storing things as compressed and decompressing them on the fly makes sense.

Since CPUs have advanced so much as of late, but hard drive speeds haven't advanced as quickly, that's a pretty common case.

@hazelnot @ghost_bird The really fuck-y thing is that RAM can be slow enough compared to CPU capacity and fast enough compared to disk access that compressing RAM in place can sometimes make sense.

@xgranade

oooh, this reminds me that zram swap is a thing (a bit of RAM configured to act as swap. Swap is usually done onto a disk, but compressing it and putting it in RAM somehow works better than just using that RAM normally!)

@hazelnot @ghost_bird